A deathbed confession is the most trusted kind of statement there is, because a person with nothing left to gain has no reason to lie. The legal record tells a less comfortable story. Of these nine cases, only a few involve a confession made on a deathbed in the literal sense, and none of those was ever tested before a jury. A dying man in Minnesota asked to speak to police. A condemned man in Florida handed a note to a pastor in the last hours before his execution. A lawyer in Illinois released her client’s written admissions two days after he died. In Oregon and Ohio the confessions came years before death and matter for what the courts did with them. In Indiana the statements belong to a hired man who died in prison after being convicted of a single count of arson, and they were reported by a clergyman and the press, not by the man himself in any court. The kind of statement matters, and so does what the law made of it: a conviction, a charge that went nowhere, or nothing at all.
From the last night of 1980 to the summer of 1982, a man telephoned police and emergency operators in St. Paul and Minneapolis after assaults on women. He sobbed, apologized and pleaded to be caught. The recordings were broadcast and the public phoned in tips, but nobody was arrested, and the press came to call him the "weepy-voiced killer."
Paul Michael Stephani, a St. Paul janitor and shipping clerk, was convicted of the August 1982 murder of Barbara Simons, 40, of Minneapolis, and of the attempted second-degree murder of a 19-year-old woman and the second-degree assault of a man who came to her aid. A Hennepin County jury returned the verdicts on the second set of charges, and the Minnesota Court of Appeals affirmed them in 1985. The appeal opinion shows a trial fought on several fronts. The defense complained of publicity, and the court recorded that lawyers questioned prospective jurors one at a time, that the defense received extra peremptory challenges, and that the judge excused a juror who had seen a broadcast. The jury was not sequestered. The judge sentenced Stephani to 203 months for the attempted murder, double the presumptive term under the state sentencing guidelines, and added a consecutive 21 months for the assault.
The calls were still unattributed in a court of law. What closed them came in the fall of 1997. Learning that he was terminally ill with cancer, Stephani asked to speak to St. Paul police. The Star Tribune reported that he confessed to the killings of Kimberly Compton, 18, in St. Paul in June 1981, and Kathleen Greening, 33, in the summer of 1982, and to an assault on a 20-year-old woman on New Year’s Eve 1980, who survived. He also confessed to the Simons killing and the 1982 assault for which he had been convicted. Tomas Guillen, writing in 2002 in the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, cited the paper’s front-page report of December 19, 1997, and wrote that the confession was what allowed police to link the killings and the calls officially. In an interview that month, the paper quoted him saying, "I’m sick and I’m sorry," and adding, "if sorry means anything after 15 years."
No charges followed. The deaths of Kimberly Compton and Kathleen Greening and the 1980 assault rest on a prisoner’s own account, which investigators said fit the evidence, and a court never examined it. Stephani died of complications of skin cancer at the prison in Oak Park Heights, Minnesota, in June 1998, at the age of 53. Accounts differ on two details. The Court of Appeals and one later account give the age of the surviving 1982 victim as 19; the Star Tribune in 1998 and Guillen give 21. The cancer is skin cancer in the Star Tribune and lung cancer in a Forum Communications retrospective. This is the cleanest kind of deathbed confession in the group: made in prison, to police, by a man who knew he was dying, about cases that had gone unsolved for fifteen years. It also produced no conviction.
The statement attributed to Larry Eyler was not made at the end of his life. It was written earlier and released after he died, and for that reason it is a confession in the loosest sense. In March 1994, according to a United Press International report of March 8, his lawyer, Kathleen Zellner, announced that her client, who had died on Illinois’s death row days before, had admitted in writing to killing 21 young men and teenage boys in Illinois and Indiana between 1982 and 1984.
The legal record before that announcement is narrower. A Cook County jury convicted Eyler in July 1986 of the murder of Danny Bridges, 15, in Chicago on August 20, 1984, together with aggravated kidnapping, unlawful restraint and concealment of a homicidal death. Circuit Judge Joseph Urso sentenced him to death. He was arrested in Chicago on August 21, 1984. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed on October 25, 1989, and denied rehearing on January 29, 1990. In December 1990 he pleaded guilty in Vermillion County, Indiana, to the 1982 murder of Steven Agan, 23, of Terre Haute, and received a sentence of 60 years, a bargain that Newsweek described under the headline "A Murderer’s Deadly Deal."
The case that did not reach a jury is the reason the confession matters. In 1983 a task force of Indiana and Illinois police was working on a run of unsolved deaths of young men, and on September 30 of that year Indiana State Police detained Eyler in northwestern Indiana. The Illinois courts later described what followed at a state police post in Lowell: a detention of about twelve hours in which, an officer conceded, there was no probable cause for murder, and out of which came a statement and a consent to search that the trial court ruled tainted by the illegal seizure. Eyler left uncharged. A Lake County grand jury nonetheless returned a three-count indictment on November 2, 1983, charging him with the murder of Ralph Calise, 28, and he was held on a bond of one million dollars. He pleaded not guilty. His new lawyer, David Schippers, filed nine motions to suppress evidence, and the Lake County court granted five. The Appellate Court of Illinois, Second District, affirmed the suppression on April 26, 1985, and the Calise murder case was never tried.
Eyler never admitted the killing for which he was sentenced to die. The 1994 release said as much, and the Bridges conviction is the one murder on the list that he denied to the end. He died aged 41 with a further appeal pending, so the death sentence was never carried out. Of the 21 killings in the written account, the law had spoken on only two. Everything else is attributed to him on the strength of a document that surfaced after the man who wrote it could no longer be questioned.
Danny Harold Rolling had already confessed once, and a court had already heard it. In August 1990, over four days in Gainesville, Florida, five young people were killed: Sonja Larson, 18; Christina Powell, 17; Christa Hoyt, 18; Tracy Paules, 23; and Manuel Taboada, 23. Rolling, a drifter from Shreveport, Louisiana, was in custody in Ocala on an unrelated robbery charge within days, and it took investigators months to connect him to Gainesville. He was indicted in Alachua County on November 15, 1991.
The route to the first confession ran through a prison informant. At Florida State Prison, Rolling befriended an inmate, Bobby Lewis, who hoped to profit from what he heard, the Florida Supreme Court said, either by selling it or by testifying for the prosecution; the state refused any deal. Lewis wrote a five-page letter of details that, in the words of Detective Hewitt, "only the killer knew." On January 31, 1993, after investigators reminded him that he had asked for a lawyer, Rolling waived the right and agreed that Lewis could serve as his "mouthpiece" in a late-night session of about three hours. Lewis told the story, and the investigators stopped repeatedly to ask whether he had it right. "Yes it is," Rolling answered. Of Lewis he said, "He’s a library of information." A second, videotaped statement followed on February 4, 1993.
On February 15, 1994, the day his trial was set to begin, Rolling pleaded guilty to all eleven counts, five of them first-degree murder. "There are some things you just can’t run from, this being one of those," he told Circuit Judge Stan R. Morris. A jury recommended death on each murder count by a vote of 12 to 0 on March 24, 1994, and Judge Morris imposed five death sentences on April 20, 1994. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed in 1997.
The second confession came as the sentence was about to be carried out. Shortly before his execution, Rolling handed his former pastor a written statement admitting the November 4, 1989 killings of Tom Grissom, 55; his daughter, Julie Grissom, 24; and his grandson, Sean Grissom, 8, in Shreveport. The Louisiana case was never tried. Rolling was executed at Florida State Prison on October 25, 2006. The note is the textbook case of a statement released before an execution: it came when no court could use it, it cost its author nothing, and it gave a Louisiana family an answer that a verdict would have given them under oath. In legal terms it stays an admission, and a Shreveport killing attributed to a man who is no longer alive to be charged.
The statements made by Edward Wayne Edwards were not deathbed confessions, and he did not die on the day he gave them. He was an elderly man, held in a county jail, who told officials in 2010 what he had told no one for decades. What gives them weight is that the admissions arrived late, in pieces, and that the last one came in a newspaper interview.
Edwards was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 30, 2009, after Wisconsin investigators matched DNA from a 1980 case to a sample he had given that July; he was charged with two counts of first-degree murder in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, in the deaths of Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew, both 19. The first confession that mattered in Ohio came in May 2010. Norton police and an investigator from the Summit County prosecutor’s office traveled to the Jefferson County jail, where Edwards admitted killing a young couple in Norton, Ohio, in 1977. He had referred in a letter to a double killing in 1976, which investigators took to be a mistake in the year, because the details matched the deaths of Billy Lavaco, 21, and Judy Straub, 18, in 1977.
On June 9, 2010, a Summit County grand jury indicted Edwards on two counts of aggravated murder, and in Wisconsin he changed his pleas. Under an agreement between the two prosecutors, he pleaded guilty to all four killings, and a prosecutor said he took the deal to spare the families a trial. On June 11, 2010, before Judge Thomas Teodosio in Akron, he pleaded guilty to the aggravated murders of Billy Lavaco and Judy Straub. A United States Supreme Court ruling had invalidated Ohio’s death penalty statutes for crimes committed between 1974 and 1978, so the judge imposed two consecutive life terms, the most the law allowed for a 1977 murder; reports said he would not be eligible for parole until age 97, though the prosecutor’s office described the sentence as 20 years to life. The Summit County prosecutor, Walsh, said she saw no remorse in the plea. "Have no illusion, however, that Edwards had some epiphany and decided to give these grieving families a break," she said, adding that he had partly wanted to serve his time in Ohio rather than in a Wisconsin prison.
On June 21, 2010, Judge William F. Hue sentenced him in Jefferson County to two life sentences. Wisconsin has no death penalty, and first-degree murder carries a mandatory life term. Edwards sat in a wheelchair, answered "no" when the judge asked whether he wished to speak, and heard Kelly Drew’s mother call him "a lying, evil murderer."
A week before that sentencing, Edwards gave the Associated Press a jailhouse interview and added a fifth name. He said he had killed his foster son, Dannie Boy Edwards, in 1996, and that he wanted the insurance money. A Geauga County, Ohio, case followed, and in March 2011, according to the Associated Press, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to death. Edwards told the AP in 2010 that he had killed only five people. Other cases attributed to him in the press never produced a charge.
Jeffrey Paul Cutlip confessed by telephone, and he did so fourteen years before the end of his life. In July 2012, living in Brownsville, Texas, he called the Brownsville Police Department. By the account of a Brownsville officer, Billy Killebrew, he spoke of "three or four murders" in Portland, Oregon, between 1970 and 1993. Two Portland homicide detectives flew to Texas. According to ABC News Radio, he telephoned on a Saturday and was arrested the next day in connection with deaths in 1975 and 1977, and he was held in the Cameron County Jail to await extradition. Portland police said they would not release victims' names until families had been told and his claims had been fully investigated.
He was extradited to Oregon in August 2012. On August 28 the Associated Press reported that a grand jury had indicted him the day before in the deaths of Marlene Claire Carlson in 1975, Julie Marie Bennett in 1977 and Nielene Doll in 1993; the news service described him as a 63-year-old who had been living in Texas when, police said, he called to confess to unsolved Oregon killings. Julie Bennett was 15. At a bail hearing in November 2012, reported by the AP, he was denied bail. His defense attorneys questioned his mental state and argued that there was little evidence to tie him to the crimes beyond his own statements.
That argument is the whole difficulty of a confession with no store of corroboration behind it, and the record shows how it was resolved. In 2013 Cutlip pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated murder and two counts of murder. He told police he had killed four women in Oregon; police were able to connect him to three. When he was sentenced in Portland on Friday, January 17, 2014, at 64, the court imposed life in prison without the possibility of parole. He made no statement. Relatives of all three victims addressed the court or were heard through letters, and the Associated Press reported that he did not look at them. The AP also reported that he had only recently been released from prison on 1982 convictions when Nielene Doll was killed in 1993.
Cutlip died in the infirmary of Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla, Oregon, in hospice care, on Sunday, March 29, 2026, aged 76. The Oregon Department of Corrections, in a release carried by KATU, gave the name Jesse Andre D’Breeze, the name he used at the end, and said he was serving a life sentence without parole for two counts of murder and one count of aggravated murder. No cause of death was reported. His fourth admitted killing was never matched to a case.
Joseph Edward Duncan III died on March 28, 2021, aged 58, of brain cancer, at a hospital near the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he was on death row. No execution date had ever been set. His place in this story is narrower. At the end of a long run of guilty pleas, one set of admissions was never accepted by the authority that would have had to charge it.
In May 2005 Duncan killed three members of a family near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Brenda Groene, 40, Mark McKenzie, 37, and Slade Groene, 13, and kidnapped the two youngest children; Dylan Groene, 9, was killed in Montana in June. He was arrested in Coeur d’Alene on July 2, 2005. He pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder and related counts in Idaho in October 2006, and on December 4, 2007, he pleaded guilty to all ten federal counts, including the kidnapping that resulted in Dylan’s death. A federal jury in Boise returned three death verdicts on August 27, 2008, and Judge Edward J. Lodge sentenced him on November 3 of that year, the same day an Idaho judge imposed three consecutive life terms on the murder counts.
The admissions that went furthest back concerned two crimes from 1996 and 1997. A fingerprint tied him to the abduction and murder of a 10-year-old boy, Anthony Martinez, in Beaumont, California, in April 1997, as the Associated Press reported in August 2005. He pleaded guilty to that murder in Riverside County in March 2011, and a judge sentenced him to life terms on April 5. Of the Seattle case there is much less. In January 2007 federal prosecutors said in court that Duncan had confessed to killing two young sisters in Seattle in July 1996, Sammiejo White, 11, and Carmen Cubias, 9. King County officials did not agree. A sheriff’s spokesman, Sergeant John Urquhart, said in August 2005 that investigators had no evidence linking Duncan to the double homicide, and a King County spokesman later said Duncan had given the FBI details about the killings that August but had not formally confessed. The King County Sheriff’s Office said in 2007 that the interview transcript did not support a confession. No charge was ever filed. The sisters' deaths are attributed to him by federal prosecutors and left unresolved by the county that would have prosecuted them.
The long final chapter of his case was a question of competence rather than of guilt: whether Duncan had been mentally competent to give up his appeal of the federal death sentences. A federal judge ruled him competent in December 2013, and in March 2016 the United States Supreme Court denied a petition to hear the competency appeal. He died five years later with the sentences intact.
In February 1920, Will Lockett, an Army veteran, was arrested in Fayette County, Kentucky, in the death of Geneva Hardman, a ten-year-old schoolgirl from the south of the county. A Fayette County grand jury indicted him on February 5, 1920. On Monday, February 9, he pleaded guilty before Circuit Judge Charles Kerr, who had appointed two lawyers, Samuel M. Wilson and George K. Hunt, to defend him; John R. Allen prosecuted. A jury fixed the penalty at death. The Associated Press reported that the jury convicted him of first-degree murder and that he was sentenced to die on March 11.
The trial is remembered in Lexington for what happened outside the courtroom. According to the Associated Press, a crowd tried to take Lockett from the courthouse, and state troops fired on it; the agency counted four dead and fifteen hurt on the day, with more deaths expected. Later local histories give six dead and about twenty wounded. The Lexington History Museum says federal soldiers followed and the city went under martial law.
On March 8, 1920, three days before the date set for his execution, Lockett made a new statement. He said that his real name was Petrie Kimbrough, and he confessed to other assaults and killings. The Lexington History Museum says authorities connected him with the death of a woman named Sallie A. Kraft. It is a pre-execution confession of the old sort, made in a cell by a man with three days to live. How the claims were checked has not been recorded, and nothing indicates that a court ever tried any of them. He was executed at the state prison in Eddyville on March 11, 1920, under the name in which he had been tried. His one conviction is for the murder of Geneva Hardman. The name Petrie Kimbrough, the other victims and the connection to Sallie Kraft remain a condemned man’s claims, recorded and never proved.
Ottis Toole did not make a deathbed confession. In 1983 and 1984 he told police in many states of about 100 killings, and he retracted a good many. The case shows how the final-statement tradition looks when the speaker will say anything to anyone who asks.
The conviction that stands is small. A Jacksonville jury convicted Toole in April 1984 of first-degree felony murder in the death of George Sonnenberg, 64, a boarding house resident, who died after a fire set on January 4, 1982. The indictment charged premeditated murder; the jury returned a verdict of felony murder, a killing committed during another felony, namely arson. The link between Toole and the fire was a confession taken from him while he was held on an unrelated charge. He testified that he had signed it only to be sent back to Jacksonville, and his lawyer argued that it was the only evidence connecting him to the fire. Circuit Judge James L. Harrison sentenced him to death in May 1984. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in 1985 but vacated the death sentence on November 25 of that year and ordered a new sentencing hearing.
By then Toole had joined his former companion Henry Lee Lucas as a source of confessions for police across the country. UPI reported in April 1984 that authorities believed the two men had killed at least 100 people over eight years; in May it said Toole had been linked to about 100 killings and charged in nine; by October he was charged in five states with ten murders besides the Jacksonville case. Lucas himself had told a Texas court in November 1983 that he had killed 165 people. A transcript of a November 1983 telephone call between the two men, recorded while law enforcement officers and defense lawyers listened, was later obtained by a newspaper. Lucas said that "just about every law enforcement agency in the country" was talking to him, and that he would keep talking "as long as they treat me like a man."
The confessions collapsed from the outside. A Dallas reporter, Hugh Aynesworth, concluded that Lucas was perpetrating a hoax, and by April 1985 his newspaper reported that Lucas had probably committed no more than three murders. Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox investigated the task force that had handled Lucas, and his 1986 report identified "numerous discrepancies between Lucas' confessions and obtainable evidence regarding his whereabouts." In Louisiana, a death row inmate, Robert Lee Willie, recanted his own confession to a 1978 killing after learning of statements by Lucas and Toole about it, and said he had confessed as part of an escape plan. Toole’s statements rose and fell with Lucas’s.
One of Toole’s confessions has a different status. He confessed repeatedly to the 1981 killing of six-year-old Adam Walsh in Hollywood, Florida, and retracted just as often; UPI reported one such confession in May 1984. He was never charged. Toole died in prison in 1996. In December 2008, the Hollywood police announced that they considered him the killer and closed the case. There was no trial, no plea, no verdict. The sole legal status of the Walsh confession is an administrative one: a police department’s decision, twelve years after the man who made it was dead, that his word had been enough.
The last case reverses the usual arrangement. Belle Gunness was never charged with anything, and the statements in this section are not hers. They are attributed to the man who was tried in her place, a former hired hand named Ray Lamphere, who died in prison in 1909, and they reach us through a clergyman, a prison warden and the newspapers.
On April 28, 1908, the farmhouse of Gunness, a Norwegian-born widow, burned outside La Porte, Indiana. In the weeks that followed, the deaths of men who had answered her notices for a husband came to light in La Porte, along with that of her foster daughter, Jennie Olson, and the La Porte County coroner, sheriff and prosecutor came to treat Gunness as responsible for them. The coroner ruled that Gunness had died in the fire, but doctors disagreed at the time and the identification has been questioned ever since. A University of Indianapolis team began a DNA study of the identification in November 2007; the results were reported inconclusive, and the most recent report on the study came on April 28, 2026. Estimates of the toll run from 10 to 14, the count of most researchers according to American History magazine in 2008, to at least 21 by the La Porte County historian Bruce Johnson, and about 25 by the forensic researcher Andrea Simmons.
The state’s case went forward against Lamphere. He was indicted for the murder of Gunness and her three children and tried in La Porte in November 1908. The jury convicted him of arson only, and he received an indeterminate term of two to twenty-one years.
Lamphere then produced, or was credited with, several incompatible accounts. In January 1910 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published what it called his confession and said his former pastor, the Reverend E. A. Schell, could confirm it. Schell, by then in Iowa, would neither confirm nor deny it and said that after taking advice he regarded what Lamphere had told him as sacred. The prosecutor dismissed the story as a cock-and-bull tale. The warden at Michigan City, identified as Reid, described a different account that Lamphere gave before he died, which the warden said was not a confession of crime. In it Lamphere said Gunness sent him away with a horse one night, that on his return he heard her quarreling with Andrew Helgelien, one of the suitors, and that she told him the next day that Helgelien had left for good. "No he did not," Lamphere said he replied.
A third version, attributed to a deathbed statement and set out by the legal writer R. Marc Kantrowitz, following the researcher Janet Langlois, has Lamphere saying that Gunness was alive, that the woman the coroner identified was someone else, and that she left by a different route than he did. An Indiana Public Media series says he also described what she had done, said he had helped her, and put her tally at 42 men and 250,000 dollars. The accounts cannot all be true, and none was heard in court. The most that can be said of them is that a prisoner near death said something to somebody, and that the people who repeated it did not agree on what.
A statement made in the days before an execution, or by a man who knows he has weeks to live, is made after the legal consequences have stopped mattering. That can make it freer. It can also make it cheaper, because nobody will ever cross-examine it. Rolling’s note and Lockett’s change of name came with the date of execution already fixed; Stephani’s request for the police came with a diagnosis. Eyler’s lawyer let the public read her client’s words only after he was beyond questioning, and Lamphere’s, if they were his, reach us through other people.
The record shows how little a late statement does alone. Stephani’s two admitted killings and Rolling’s three were never charged. Lockett’s other crimes were never tried. The Calise murder case against Eyler had already failed in court on the illegal detention, and the confession came nine years later. Toole’s confessions, offered in bulk, came apart under investigation, and Duncan’s admissions about Seattle were disputed by the county that would have prosecuted them. Where a confession did lead to a conviction, as with Cutlip and Edwards, it had been made to police or an interviewer years before the end, and the pleas, not the speeches, produced the sentences. In the cases where the confession came last, the courts had nothing left to do with it.
• 1908, April 28: The Gunness farmhouse burns outside La Porte, Indiana.
• 1908, November: Ray Lamphere is tried in La Porte and convicted of arson only.
• 1909: Lamphere dies in the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City.
• 1910, January: Newspapers report statements attributed to Lamphere; his former pastor declines to confirm them.
• 1920, February 9: Will Lockett pleads guilty in Fayette County, Kentucky, to the murder of Geneva Hardman, 10; a jury fixes the penalty at death.
• 1920, March 8: Lockett gives a new name and confesses to other assaults and killings.
• 1920, March 11: Lockett is executed at Eddyville, Kentucky.
• 1981: Adam Walsh, 6, is killed in Hollywood, Florida.
• 1982, January 4: A boarding house fire in Jacksonville, Florida, results in the death of George Sonnenberg.
• 1983, September 30: Larry Eyler is detained by Indiana State Police for about twelve hours and released.
• 1983, November 2: Eyler is indicted in Lake County, Illinois, for the murder of Ralph Calise.
• 1984, April and May: Ottis Toole is convicted of felony murder and sentenced to death; Toole and Lucas confessions are reported across states.
• 1985, April 26: The Illinois Appellate Court affirms the suppression of evidence in the Eyler Calise case.
• 1985, November 25: The Florida Supreme Court vacates Toole’s death sentence.
• 1986, July: Eyler is convicted in Cook County of the murder of Danny Bridges and sentenced to death.
• 1990, August: Five young people are killed in Gainesville, Florida.
• 1990, December: Eyler pleads guilty in Indiana to the murder of Steven Agan.
• 1993, January 31: Danny Rolling gives a statement to investigators through another inmate.
• 1994, February 15: Rolling pleads guilty to all counts.
• 1994, March: Eyler dies on death row; his lawyer releases the confession to 21 killings.
• 1994, April 20: Rolling is sentenced to death.
• 1997, fall: Paul Stephani, terminally ill, asks to speak to St. Paul police and confesses to two killings and an assault.
• 1998, June: Stephani dies in prison at Oak Park Heights, Minnesota.
• 2005, July 2: Joseph Duncan is arrested in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
• 2006, October 25: Rolling is executed; shortly before, he hands his former pastor a written statement on three Shreveport killings.
• 2007, January: Federal prosecutors say Duncan confessed to the 1996 Seattle killings; King County says the transcript does not support it.
• 2008, August 27: A federal jury returns three death verdicts against Duncan.
• 2008, December 16: Hollywood police close the Adam Walsh case, naming Toole.
• 2009, July 30: Edward Edwards is arrested in Louisville, Kentucky.
• 2010, June 9 to 21: Edwards pleads guilty to four killings and is sentenced to consecutive life terms in Ohio and two life sentences in Wisconsin.
• 2010, June 17: Edwards admits in an Associated Press interview to killing his foster son.
• 2011, March: Edwards pleads guilty in Geauga County, Ohio, and is sentenced to death.
• 2011, March and April: Duncan pleads guilty in Riverside County, California, to the 1997 murder of a 10-year-old boy and is sentenced to life.
• 2012, July: Jeffrey Cutlip telephones Brownsville, Texas, police and confesses; he is arrested within a day.
• 2014, January 17: Cutlip is sentenced to life without parole in Portland, Oregon.
• 2021, March 28: Duncan dies on federal death row in Indiana.
• 2026, March 29: Cutlip dies in prison in Umatilla, Oregon.